King's College London

Dr Oya Celiktutan, Reader in AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering, has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering to develop socially intelligent robots that can help patients and clinicians in places of care.

Together with her partners at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, Dr Celiktutan will design robots that will embed safety and responsibility into their design to work alongside users in spaces like hospitals.

While in areas like manufacturing robots have seen increasing use on production lines, those which are socially aware and able to assist humans in social settings remains limited despite their potential impact.

As the Head of the Social AI & Robotics Lab at King’s, Oya’s work explores how to develop robots that can read a situation and room socially, adapt to their surroundings, and move through spaces without causing frustration to the humans around it. She achieves this through work on robot navigation in crowds, continual learning, social signal processing, and user modelling, ensuring that behaviour is matched to user need.

As part of this focus on user need and carving specific roles for individual robots, the work also helps to ensure that assistive robotics is seen as an augmentation to, and never a replacement for, human centred care.

Dr Celiktutan said of the work, “Our vision is to design robots that are socially responsible and responsive across the full spectrum of life, and that means embedding safety, fairness and user-centricity at the heart of what we do. That means robots that treat patients equally, interact with them safely, and act in a way that’s socially aware to put them at ease.

Human-robot interaction can help transform healthcare, education and public services, and our work ensures this is done responsibly and not at the expense of the human-to-human relationships that make these essential utilities great.”

Funded by the UK Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, the Academy’s Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships scheme supports engineering academics to lead ambitious, applied research in collaboration with an industrial partner.

Denis Lafitte, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts, said of the project “Technology, hand-in-hand with expertise on the ground, is increasingly important to the success of the NHS. We’re excited to be at the ground floor of this collaboration with King’s College London to ensure future technological development is matched to user needs.”